BIOLOGY TESTING FACILITY - BIOINFORMATICS/LITERATURE DATA-MINING TO ESTABLISH CONTRACEPTIVE DRUG TARGET PROFILE

Sri International, Menlo Park CA

Investigators

Abstract

Limited targets are the major obstacles in the early phase of non-steroidal contraceptive product discovery and development. It is important to facilitate discovery of those non-steroidal targets with the aim of developing new approaches to advance next generation of safe contraceptive drug/device usage in order to avoid those side effects caused by steroidal hormone use. One potential effective procedure to establish a non-steroidal target database is to apply informatics/bioinformatics approach to identify and curate those targets from the existing database s as well as from literature. Search/curation could include reproductive tract system specific male and female targets followed by data-mining to organize the ranking for drugability. The Biological Testing Facility has bioinformatics capability to identify potential target candidates in addition to permit rapid evaluation (in vitro and in vivo) of new compositions of matter to the target, efficacy evaluation, safety/ toxicology assessment, drug formulations, delivery systems, and devices for contraceptives followed by clinical batch preparation/ release and continued stability testing of drugs to be evaluated in clinical trials. The BTF provides overall project management and the capabilities to support all phases of novel target product identification, drug discovery/ optimization, preclinical activities and development of contraceptives and associated tasks leading to the filing of investigational new drug (IND) applications. The task will focus on identification of non-steroidal male and female contraceptive, fertility and infertility targets. The task will apply informatics/bioinformatics curation and analyses from the database including but not limited to public and available private informatics: genomic/ proteomic/ expression, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) and mutation/ deletion associated functional or putative polymorphism with fertility /infertility. In addition, study and analysis may include but not limited to determination of up- and down-stream networking pathways. The services may be developed in house or via appropriate subcontract facilities.